40 Under 40

Ira Glass, 39

Producer, host "This American Life",
National Public Radio

"I don't think of myself that way," he insists. "That's Spaulding Gray or Garrison Keillor. I'm a skilled editor. Every other skill I have starts from that."

Whatever the label, Mr. Glass is the creator and driving force behind "This American Life," a weekly collection of stories, some true and some fictionalized, but all keyed to a theme such as "Cruelty of Children" or "Jobs that Take Over Your Life."

Launched locally on WBEZ-FM in 1995, the one-hour program is now carried on some 260 public radio stations and reaches an enraptured audience of about 600,000 listeners each week. It won a prestigious Peabody Award in its first year.

"What Ira does is unlike anything out there," WBEZ General Manager Torey Malatia says. "It's fresh. It's new. It has an attitude that can only come from Chicago."

A Baltimore native who earned a semiotics degree at Brown University, Mr. Glass stumbled into radio at 19, working as an intern at National Public Radio in Washington, D.C., where he learned virtually every job. In 1989, he became a reporter, covering Chicago school reform for "All Things Considered," a national news and public affairs program, for two years.

His reporting was distinguished by its thoroughness and unusual angles. He spent months at Lincoln Park High School for a series about race relations, returning two years later to see what had happened to the students he'd followed closely.

Later, he channeled his desire to create "radio that isn't boring or corny" into "The Wild Room," a wildly eclectic effort on WBEZ that even Mr. Glass has trouble describing. "It would've been hard to get to 'This American Life' if not for 'The Wild Room,' " he notes.

Though Mr. Glass is a celebrity in the public radio universe, he savors the prospect of a simple reward--one that is fitting for a guy who works 80-hour weeks.

"I'd like," he says, "to have weekends off."

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